The Burning Season

The Sunday Pilgrimage #8

The Martyr’s Memorial, Oxford, England

Why has Christianity declined so steeply in the West over the last century or two? Whole libraries of books have been written on this question, and we could probably all choose our favourite culprit depending on our perspectives and prejudices. The Reformation. The scientific revolution. The French revolution. The theory of evolution. The ‘migration of the holy’ from church to state. The rise of the state. Capitalism. Liberalism. The sexual revolution.

They’re all fairly convincing culprits, if you ask me, especially if you combine them all. But there’s another responsible party that Christians tend to hum and haw about because they can’t blame somebody else for it. I’m referring to the historical Christian tendency to burn other Christians alive.

I’m being flippant, but also serious. It seems clear to me that one of the important reasons for Christianity’s decline was simply the faith’s failure to live up to its own teachings. This has manifested itself in numerous ways over the centuries: holy wars, sexual abuse scandals, church leaders cosying up to earthly rulers or attempting to become earthly rulers themselves, excesses of lust, gluttony, cupidity … all of the things of the fallen world, in other words.

But the problem was never more manifest than during the wars of religion which followed the deep schism within the Western Church that we call the Reformation. Whether you’re Catholic or Protestant or none of the above, you would be hard-pressed to deny the litany of horrors that professing Christians carried out on other confessing Christians over the course of a century or so. There was very little of God’s agape love in evidence back then, and plenty of human evil. The fact that the evil called itself ‘Christian’ has had a lasting impact to this day. Nietzsche famously said that there was only one true Christian and he died on the cross. I don’t believe that’s true myself, but it’s a rhetorical flourish that can be easily backed up by history.

Christians have been arguing with one another over matters of deep import for two thousand years. The bickering started as soon as Christ ascended: you can see it kicking off in the Acts of the Apostles, and it hasn’t stopped since. Christianity is not alone here, of course: you won’t find a religion on earth that isn’t divided into sects and schools, all of which think the others are dangerously wrong about the fundamental teachings. It’s not just the religions, either: atheist ideologies like Marxism are just as prone to this schismatic behaviour, if not more so. This is not a Christian problem, in other words: it’s a human one.

Still, if Christianity does not enable its followers to overcome human problems, then what’s it worth? Are Christians supposed to behave just like everyone else? Clearly not: we are instructed to turn the other cheek when slapped, not to resist evil, and to forgive our brothers seventy-times-seven times. Our teacher allowed himself to be tortured and killed rather than explain himself to the powers of the world. He who lives by the sword, he explained clearly, will die by it.

How are we doing with this?

For the next fortnight we’ll be back in Oxford, and this week we’re visiting not a church or a ruined abbey or a holy well but something we haven’t seen before, because there are very few of them about: a public monument to some of the victims of this Christian-on-Christian bloodshed. This monument is the simply-named Martyrs Memorial.

This epic Gothic construction sits in the middle of one of the main thoroughfares of Oxford, St Giles, outside one of its richest colleges, St John’s, and just across from one of the world’s first museums, the Ashmolean. When I lived in Oxford I would cycle past it all the time without paying much attention. Sometimes I would sit on its base and wait for a bus or eat a sandwich. It’s a huge thing, it occupies a prominent spot, and it exists to make a point.

But which point, why - and to whom?

The martyrs in question were victims of the tit-for-tat violence of the English Reformation, which began with Henry VIII, but really got going during the brief reign of his son Edward VI. Edward, unlike his father, was a committed Protestant, and was determined to scour the ‘Romish’ religion out of every crevice of English life. His reign saw a transformation of the English church, from the sort-of-Catholic-but-without-the-Pope arrangement that Henry VIII had tried to bed in, to a properly Protestant institution which rejected monasticism, professed the Lutheran doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone’ and effectively abolished the mass.

So much for English Catholicism. Except that there was a twist in the tale: Edward died young, and his successor (after a brief attempt to install England’s shortest-lived queen to ensure that the revolution continued) was the only queen to have an alcoholic drink named in her honour: his sister, ‘Bloody Mary.’

Mary, unlike her brother, was a deeply devout Catholic, and she was determined to bring back the ‘old religion.’ She moved swiftly to re-attach the English church to Rome, abolish all her father and brother’s religious laws, and effectively restore the church in England to its pre-Reformation state.

But things had gone too far for Mary to be able to turn back the clock. The country was by now full of influential and powerful church figures who had embraced the Reformation. Mary imprisoned some of the most notable early in her reign, but the country would still not go easily back to Rome. In response, one year into her reign, Mary reinstated a group of ancient laws dating back to the fourteenth century, which had been abolished by Henry and Edward: the Heresy Acts. These allowed for the ‘arresting and apprehension of erroneous and heretical preachers’.

These were the laws which would earn Mary her nickname and her place in history. Within a year of their return, those who refused to recant their Protestantism were subject to public execution by burning. One of the most famous of these executions occurred in Oxford. Hugh Ridley, Bishop of London, Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, and - most controversially of all - Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, were all tried for heresy in 1555, found guilty and dispatched to the flames in a ditch in Broad Street, not far from where their names are now memorialised in stone.

The spot on which they were burned is still marked by a stone cross in the middle of the road - though when I visited last year it was hemmed in by the temporary wooden chalets of a Christmas market:

The martyrs’ names are today grandly memorialised in stone on their monument:

Their faces are memorialised too, high up on the Gothic spire, behind wires that protect them from the city’s irreligious pigeons:

Mary’s counter-revolution, though, was doomed to fail. Her reign, like that of her brother, was short, and she was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who continued where the Protestant radicals had left off. Elizabeth went on burning heretics - Catholic ones this time - but since the Protestant England she cemented produced the nation’s future historians, she has tended to get a better press than her sister. Certainly she got a better nickname.

So that’s the story of the ‘Oxford martyrs.’ Sharp-eyed readers may have noted, however, that this memorial looks suspiciously like a piece of Victorian Gothic architecture. They would be right: it was designed by the 19th century Gothic revivalist Sir George Gilbert Scott, who is perhaps best known for London’s Albert Memorial, along with a number of other classic examples of Victorian Gothic. This is the Oxford monument just after completion in 1843, surrounded by suitably Dickensian types:

So why that 300-year gap between the burning of the martyrs and the building of their memorial? Well, the answer is that the divisions caused by the Reformation had not died down in all that time. The 1840s, when the monument was built, was the high watermark of something called the ‘Oxford Movement’ within the Church of England. ‘High Church Anglicans’ in the city, led by John Henry Newman, Edward Pusey, John Keble and others, were calling for the reinstatement of various pre-Reformation Catholic doctrines and practices within the English church. They saw Anglicanism as one of ‘three branches’ of the original church, the other two being Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Essentially they wanted their traditions back.

This did not go down well in a university from which Catholics were still banned from graduating. Suspecting a plot to ‘Romanise’ the Church of England from within, the Oxford Movement met stiff resistance from ‘low church’ Anglicans who cleaved to more severe Protestant doctrines. The Martyr’s Memorial stems from this battle. It was, in effect, a theological statement erected in full public view by the hardcore Protestant wing of Anglicanism’s ‘broad church.’ People died for this Reformation, it declared, not so subtly. We cannot surrender it now!

The Oxford movement was very influential in its time, though: one of its founders, John Keble, even got his very own Victorian Gothic building named after him, in the form of Keble College Oxford:

Still, their crusade to effectively undo the Reformation didn’t work, and Newman, notoriously, became a Catholic as a result, eventually rising to the rank of Cardinal. The Church of the England still stands, just about. The Martyrs Memorial still stands too: a monument to suffering, to division and, in a very particular way, to the spiritual struggles of England.